*SPOILER ALERT. This writeup is based on how this film appeared for me during and post its runtime. *
What is a home? That seems to be the question that director C Prem Kumar asks in his sophomore directorial, Meiyazhagan.
As a young Arvind Swami goes from room-to-room-to-room to take in one last look at the house he is going to leave behind in Thanjavur, the camera that takes us through the house, lingers ever so slightly more. There is a longing. A yearning.
“I want to take this all in. I want to remember what this room looked like, smelt like, felt like…”
And yet, as the swift whiplash turn of the camera occurs, there is also a finality. There is no looking back.
“I don’t ever want to remember anything.”
To a person who grew up for 16 years in Thanjavur and has resided in Chennai for the last 22 years, which of these two places is his true home? For the birds that he feeds every day, is Arvind Swami home because he regularly cares for them or is he yet another pitstop in their travel? He asks for forgiveness to the birds since he is going to miss feeding them for one evening. But he reassures them that he will be “back home” in a day. He does not want these birds to abandon him. He considers himself their…home?
For the bus conductor Karunakaran, who is responsible for people finding their homes; who gets a nice little fruit from a grandma as he helps her find her stop, I wondered, what does home look like for him?
As Arvind Swami sits and eats food at the reception, does he find home in the spread in front of him? For his young sister, for whom he has braved this one-night journey back to his childhood home, it is clear that she finds home in the happy tears and embrace of Arvind Swami.
Enter Karthi and our understanding of what home is, further expands. Home is a one-month stay at his favourite person’s place for the one and only time in his life. Home is his bicycle, that pretty much changes his entire life. Home is a set of rooms constructed in bricks and cement that he buys for his wife because she loved it, and even probably deserved it. Home is in the peace he gets communing with a formless god in a desolate temple ruin far away from the eyes of civilisation. Home is a formless tune that is seared in his psyche, but home is also a fully formed Tamil language that he appreciates in the form of song lyrics. Home is a place contoured by sticks and sand in jallikattu fields, but at the same time home is also a place not bound by geography – as Karthi finds it in his tears and deep anguish for those who died in Sri Lanka and Tuticorin.
For his wife Sri Divya, home is not just a place where Karthi resides. It becomes one when he comes back home and sleeps next to her. For his bull Dhoni, home is a place where he gets to ‘play’ with people around him.
There is so much that is thrown at Arvind Swami’s inner search for what is truly the meaning of a home during this film’s three hour run time. Can a single word mean so much to so many? Can a single word mean so much to one? Can a single word ever truly have a singular meaning?
As Vijay Narain sings “Poren naan poren… koodaaa poren” (I am going, I am going, I am going as a shell), Kamal assuages him, “Poi vaa magane,varamal irukaadhe, unakaaga kaathiruppom, poi nee vaa” (Go and come back; don’t forget to come back. We will be waiting for you.). Kamal personifies home here (and I am sure after 50 years in the industry, he probably feels like home to many.). His melancholic voice surely feels like home to some of us for sure. But that voice, which was full of reassurance at the start, changes track at the end. It is full of doubts. The person who returned as a shell is not empty anymore. The shell is now full of unconditional love that this voice couldn’t really comprehend.
Maybe homes are just that. They are so used to giving love that they forget that they deserve some in return too. How many times have our pets understood our emotions and plopped next to us quietly? How many times have people in our lives, without a single expectation/utterance from us, done something for us – with their words or silence, with gifts or their presence – because they felt like it; because they felt we needed it? How many times have our own vehicles got us through that extra 100m to the petrol bunk, when they had no business to do so?
Maybe, just maybe, home is where unbounded love resides.